The Duke at home.

The Duke at home

THIS ADMINISTRATION has given us one scandal after another, one resignation after another, one example of governmental misconduct after another." That was Michael Dukakis the day Ed Meese resigned, talking about the Reagan Administration. Funny; he could have been talking about his own. Just a few hours earlier, and just a few hundred yards away from where the Duke was delivering his smug tirade, his former chief education advisor and close friend, Gerald Thomas Indelicato, had been arraigned on a variety of corruption charges ranging back to his days in the first Dukakis administration (1974-78). But Dukakis's people hadn't noticed Indelicato's problems ("We don't micro-manage around here," the governor's press secretary explained), so during Dukakis's second stint in the statehouse (starting in 1982), Indelicato was appointed to the presidency of Bridgewater State College (salary: $80,000 a year). The governor took a day off from the campaign trail in May 1987 to personally swear in his old buddy, lauding Indelicato's ability to create "a sense of community."

But that was 14 months earlier. Now, that community--Plymouth County--was about to arraign Indelicato on a whole slew of new charges, including forging the names of college trustees to a deed for a Bridgewater State-owned lot where Indelicato wanted to build his presidential dream house. And that Friday, he would be sentenced in federal district court in Boston on yet another series of felonies to which he had already pleaded guilty. (He was sentenced to thirty months and ordered to pay $80,000 to the state in restitution for bogus consulting contracts.)

No one outside Boston knows about Indelicato because the arraignments didn't come down from the grand juries until after the Democratic presidential primaries. (Incidentally, Attorney General Jim Shannon, in charge of those grand juries, is a Dukakis ally.) But, the day Meese resigned, the local press slugged away trying to get the Duke to say something, anything, about Indelicato. No go: the governor was only taking questions about Republican corruption. "You can't build the kind of America we want," he said, "with one scandal after another.... One of the things that I bring to this race is a record of appointing people.... You have to try very hard to pick people who... understand what integrity is all about."

In all, the press conference lasted 3 minutes, 53 seconds. time devoted to Ed Meese: 3 minutes, 51 seconds. Time devoted to the state's out-of-control budget deficit: 2 seconds (one answer was muttered as the Duke left the podium, making it unusable on television). Time devoted to Gerry Indelicato: 0 seconds.

MICHAEL DUKakis'S tendency to attack his political opponents for the quality of their appointees long predates Ed Meese. In 1982, when he was trying to unseat Democratic Governor Edward J. King (who had unseated him in 1978), the Duke ran against corruption in state government. He urged drivers to turn on their headlights in the daytime if they were as appalled by scandal as he was. He held a rally on the steps of the statehouse, on what he termed "Stand Up for integrity" Day. In the statewide television debate, he asked King: "With your record of bad judgment and bad appointments, what can you say to us tonight to convince us you've changed, and that we can expect anything better over the next four years?"

But six years later, the record is clear: Mike Dukakis--the Democratic nominee for President, the "honest technocrat" devoted to competence rather than ideology--has presided over the most corrupt administration in the last 25 years of the already-ripe history of Massachusetts state government.

There's the sheriff of Middlesex County: when the elected sheriff died of a heart attack a couple of years ago, it was up to Dukakis to appoint an interim replacement. His choice, John P. McGonigle, is currently under investigation by a state grand jury concerning a no-show job scheme.

Another responsibility of the governor: the Boston Licensing Board. In April, a lawyer suspended from the bar--whose practice mainly consisted of representing joints in the Combat Zone, the city's dying red-light district--was indicted on charges of bribing two unnamed members of the Licensing Board. Both were appointees of the handson governor.

Back to the campus: In 1978, the Dukakis administration appointed Francis Pilecki president of Westfield State College. A few years later, Pilecki resigned after scandals involving homosexual molestation. So he was allowed to return to his professorship at Fitchburg State College, though the Duke's own special counsel noted that Pilecki had made sexual advances to a young man there in 1976. Oh, and Pilecki's Dukakis-appointed successor at Westfield has recently been caught 1) bending the rules to get his 16-year-old daughter admitted and 2) filing for dinner expenses with people who don't exist.

And then there's the Stanley Barczak affair. No, Barczak is not a Dukakis appointee. He was a minor Revenue Department official under Ed King, upon whom Dukakis wanted revenge for 1978. In 1982, when King was up for re-election, Barczak was apprehended accepting a payoff in the lobby of a downtown Boston hotel. The case was turned over to the State Attorney General, Frank Bellotti, who was feuding with Governor King. Bellotti assigned the case to a Dukakis campaign contributor, and soon the papers were full of leaks about "widespread corruption" in the Revenue Department. No trials were held until after the primary, and then every case prosecuted with Barczak as lead witness fell through.

But once Dukakis was in office, he appointed the unsuccessful prosecutor/campaign contributor to the prestigious committee that selects the Commonwealth's judges. And the Duke appointed the state policeman who bugged Barczak's telephone to the State Racing Commission.

Fast forward to 1988. A new scandal is brewing in the Revenue Department--Mike Dukakis's Revenue Department. Another minor employee is arrested for stealing state funds; he was apparently deep in debt, and legbreakers from South Boston reportedly began showng up at his office, trying to collect. This time, though, there are no reports of widespread corruption. The revenue commissioner, Stephen Kidder, appears before the troops to tell them not to lose faith: "Remember, this was just one person out of a sterling department of 2,600 people,"

A voice came from the back of the room: "How come when it was Barczak, it was all of us?"

MANY OF DUKAKIS'S current embarrassments with corruption date back to the 1982 Democratic primary, and the deals Dukakis had to cut to defeat the conservative, pro-growth King. For instance, Dukakis realized that he had been deeply hurt in his 1978 bid for re-election by the opposition of the law-enforcement community. The reason for their enmity was obvious: not only had he refused to grant the state police the raises they thought they deserved (their wives picketed Duke rallies during the campaign), but he also commuted the sentences of dozens of murderers.

But in 1982, Dukakis scored a major coup. He won the backing of the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) police union, which represented the state's third largest force. It made for good TV--not all the police hated the Duke. The president of the union was a patrolman named Jack Picardi. As soon as Dukakis was back in office, he appointed as commissioner of the MDC an ex-cab driver and unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor named Bill Geary. Geary appointed a cop named Thomas Keough as superintendent of the MDC police, and Keough named as his deputy--Jack picardi. The Duke quickly pushed for huge increases for the MDC, who, among their fellow officers became known as "Mike Dukakis Cops."

All was fine for a year or so, until it was revealed that Picardi, with permission from Keough, had been moonlighting. He had debugged the offices of the assistant majority whip of the State House of Representatives--who had been recorded on tape accepting a $5,000 payoff from an undercover FBI agent.

Say goodbye Keough. Ditto Picardi. They were replaced by another MDC stalwart, Nelson "Sonny" Barner. but his term of office would also be brief--he was quickly indicted by a federal grand jury in the "Examscam" scandal. "Examscam" was a sweet operation for MDC captain Gery Clemente, who stole civil-service exams and resold them to other cops (he also robbed banks). Barner was a "consultant" to Clemente and his partners; he is currently appealing his conviction for perjury. At one point, the personnel records of almost 10 per cent of the MDC police were subpoenaed; they were under suspicion of having purchased exams from Clemente.

There have been other minor scandals in the MDC during the Dukakis years--cocaine trafficking, sale of unregistered machine guns, things like that. And Dukakis's deputy commissioner of public safety, Robert Cunningham, was forced to resign in 1985 when local media revealed his ties to a convicted loan shark.

By 1986, the MDC had become such an utter disgrace that the Dukakis organization didn't even want the union's endorsement. But rather than offend the rank-and-file, the Dukakis campaign quietly announced that it would not accept endorsements from police unions.

Another area in which Dukakis tried, a lot more successfully, to capture the moral high ground is the matter of contributions from Political Action Committees. Michael Dukakis won't accept them: he won't be bought by special interests. But what the hard-eyed investigative reporters of the national press corps have failed to point out is that, if you accept funds from a PAC set up by, say, the law firm that handles the state's lucrative bond-counsel business, the most you can accept from it is $5,000. If, however, dozens of partners in the firm and their spouses each donate the maximum individual contribution of $1,000--which the members of a number of Boston law firms and New York investment-banking firms have done--you will end up with much, much more than five grand.

Before the Duke discovered this neat trick--how to simultaneously out-fundraise your opponent and pummel him for moral turpitude--he was not so averse to accepting money from PACs in Massachusetts. One of them was the Bricklayers' Union. Their president is an amiable Irishman by the name of Tom McIntyre--you might have seen the commercials he did for Dukakis during the Florida primary, admitting that the average blue-collar guy might not ever want to have a beer with the Duke, but claiming that the governor was pretty good at producing jobs (actually, the state has lost almost 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Dukakis returned to office in 1983).

In any case, on June 10, 1983, the Bricklayers contributed $5,000 to the Dukakis Committee--seven months after one election, almost three years before the next one. Five days later Dukakis fired the state labor commissioner and replaced him with George Ripley, previously a business agent for the Bricklayers. Ripley proceeded to hire his two daughters to work for him. When this got out, the State Ethics Committee fined him, and he was forced to resign, but once again, the Duke had been embarrassed by Massachusetts's rancid patronage system--the same one he had promised to abolish "lock, stock, and barrel."

Of course, it's only natural that the Commonwealth bureaucracy would be scandal-ridden, considering its growth under the Duke. Ed King's last budget, Fiscal Year 1983, was $6.9 billion; the FY 1989 budget is almost $12 million. In other words, it has increased at three times the rate of inflation. By the end of his first term after taking over from King, the erstwhile reformer had added approximately ten thousand people to the state payroll. The exact number isn't known, because the "hands-on" governor has never come up with a system to discover just how many people the state employs. The big boys get consultant contracts--which have boomed from $147 million to $447 million. One labor lawyer and Duke fundraiser made more than $1.6 million negotiating with the state employees' union--also friends of Dukakis--to keep their pay raise down to just over 50 per cent in five years.

What's left? Well, the current FBI investigation looks interesting. Two Dukakis campaign contributors bought a compound in the little town of New Braintree (pop. 800) and offered it to the state as the site of a five-hundred-bed prison. Over the previous three years, the site had been considered and rejected by state authorities at least twice--the buildings would need complete reconstruction and the town has no public transportation and no doctor, let alone a hospital.

The facility was purchased for $3 million in December 1985 by Daniel Striar and Gary Jacobson. Within two weeks, the site moved to the top of the administration's prison-site list. The "independent appraiser" five months later valued it at $8.7 million.

Striar and Jacobson had informed town officials that a prison was going up, and the town complained to Dukakis, who met with them in May and promised a full study of the issue. A month later, without study, he asked the legislature for $22 million to build the prison and $10 million for the land. New Braintree launched its own investigation. Here's what they found:

Although Dukakis claimed throughout 1986 that he knew neither Jacobson nor Striar, it turns out that, in addition to being heavy contributors, both are known to him. Jacobson lived around the corner from Dukakis when the two were growing up in Brookline--Dukakis now remembers shoveling snow from the Jacobson driveway. New Braintree found a photo of Dukakis and Striar together at the September 1986 dedication of a Jewish community center named after the Striar family. And New Braintree found that Striar's name appears three times in the notes of a May 1986 meeting with Dukakis on the prison-siting question. (Aides explain that he wasn't paying attention.)

The man most responsible for the prison siting, James Circo, Dukakis's Deputy Secretary of Human Services for Corrections, left his post early this year to join the Beacon Company, managed by Alan Leventhal, one of Dukakis's two biggest national fundraisers. The FBI launched its investigation in June. Jacobson and Striar hired a public-relations firm (with intimate links to Dukakis) to spruce up their image, but that campaign went astray when Jacobson assaulted a woman cameraman on the way to a meeting with state officials.

As is usual in cases involving friends of the governor, no arrests were made.